Few days into the protests about the brutal and unfair murder of George Floyd, I came across a video of his six-year-old daughter saying, “My Daddy Changed the world.” Her naivety to what is going on is apparent. She had a fair innocent smile while making her statement, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she genuinely understands the implication of what happened or what is going on?
She’s barely seven years old. If anyone is to guess, it would be safer to bet that she does not yet understand the full implication of what it means to be dead. Neither does she know any intricacies of the politics behind the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
All over the internet, I have seen her pictures with her fist raised in solidarity to the movement, beautifully adorned with a photo of her dead father on a mask that reads ‘I can’t breathe’ on it, posing for some political propaganda, like Katniss Everdine in Hunger Games.
One intrinsic part of politics is that it uses everyone it presumes to help. The protests and riots going through the entirety of the American metropolis over the alleged racially motivated murder of George Floyd have been politicized to the point that you barely recognize what fundamentally is the grouse of the protesting group.
However, in our every social justice activism, we must let children be children. This is a little girl who lost her father in the most gruesome way possible—made to wear pictures reiterating the trauma of his tragic death. She used it as a political pawn to advance narratives that even she, at her young age, barely grasps its fundamentals.
Children should be children. We must never tear away from their innocence by making them oblivious pawns to echo our political sentiments. The murder of George Floyd is a heinous crime that must be condemned. The use of young Gianna Floyd as a willing naïve pawn for companies and media houses to advance their virtue signaling career and social justice activism, is both immoral and gross.
Let’s not make the childhood of an innocent girl that needs protection to score political points in our never-ending squabbles.
